I was sad to see Graham Greene go. He was one of my father's
oldest friends. Greene's father, James, was headmaster of
Berkhamsted, which both Graham and my father attended. James
Greene's powerful denunciations of modern civilization in its
downward trend no doubt helped propel both of them toward therapeutic
ideologies.

When my mother was on her deathbed in the Mercy Hospital in Cork in
the autumn of 1989, 1 read to her portions of Greene's interview
with John Cornwell on the subject of his beliefs, published in The
Observer for September 24 of that year. She listened keenly, and so did
the four other ladies, all of them devout Catholics, in the small ward.

"`And what about Saltan? Do you believe in the devil or in
demons? " I kept my voice low, not wishing to upset the rest of
the ward.

"He says he doesn't believe in hell:' There was
sepulchral silence in the ward.

"`Do you contemplate God in a pure, disembodied way?

"`I'm afraid I don't.'" I bellowed this,
to spare my mother the inconvenience of asking me to repeat it.

Sister Joan came in and sank to her knees. It was the hour for her
to lead the ward in reciting Hail Marys. My mother and I kept quiet in
our corner of the room.

Later I came across my father's description of Greene's
conversion to Catholicism, as tape-recorded in our house in Ardmore by
Greene's biographer Norman Sherry in 1977, four years before my
father died in St. Finbar's, not so far across town from the Mercy:

Quite early on, Graham said to me that he had fallen madly
in love with this girl, but she wouldn't go to bed with him unless
he married her. So I said, "Well, there ate lots of other
girls in the world, but still if that's the way you feel, well go
ahead and marry her. What difference does it make?" And
then he came back and said (this went on over quite a number
of weeks), "The trouble is that she won't marry me unless
I become a Catholic:' I said, "Why not? If you're so obsessed
with this girl, you've got to get it out of your system:' He was
rather shocked, because he said, "You of all people, a noted
atheist:' I said, "Yes, because you're the one that's superstitious,
because I don't think it matters. If you worry about becoming
a Catholic, it means you take it seriously, and you
think there is something there:' I said, "Go right ahead-take
instruction or whatever balderdash they want you to go
through, if you need this for your fuck, go ahead and do
it. . . ." And then to my amazement, the whole thing suddenly
took off and became serious and he became a Catholic
convert. So then I felt perhaps I'd done the wrong thing.

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